Together in the Torrent

May 7, 2020

I've been watching the leaders closely, and I don't mean the political ones.

I've been talking with farmers, and museum CEOs, and small business owners, and arts directors, and teachers, and professors, and grocery store and restaurant managers, and corporate team managers and IT people and tourism professionals. A leader has three main jobs: To plan for the future, to communicate the directions to that future to her team, and to hold things together as everyone moves there carefully.

The leaders have been showing me that right now we're mostly in hold-together mode. They're stretching out their arms and clenching their fingers around the edges of their teams and hugging tight. And while they're doing that, they're being realistic but positive too, making sober plans, and reminding their team that we're a resilient, modern society, so we'll get through this.

Good leaders know, too, that there's no shame in expressing their humanity, their regret, their skepticism, or their lack of knowledge about the unknowable, as long as it's done with dignity and realism, based on as many facts as they can find. Leaders mourn in public and save their whining for private time. And they convey that although we all understandably feel helpless, we aren't actually helpless, and that by acting sensibly together, we'll win.

The only constant during the epidemic is constant change, but the leaders are adapting, and so are we. Their plans have to be flexible, so we consumers will need to roll with that as we watch society come back to life. And we will. Before Coronavirus, we heard a lot of negative talk about the frenzied pace of change in modern society, but we've learned how to keep our heads above water in this torrent, which makes us infinitely more equipped to thrive than we were a century ago.

While every parent is always a leader just by the nature of the job, these days we're the only leaders in our kids' immediate orbits. So it's an unprecedented opportunity to show our kids what leadership means: Cultivate a family identity of being smart and sensible... of being unashamed to talk about feelings while remembering that they don't always point us to the truth... and of making short-term plans for the adventure of our present condition and long-term plans for the adventure of our future. St